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No Rest for the E-tailer January 28, 2012 Your online store did record sales this past holiday and you are a happy person at the start of the year. After a few days of rejoicing, it is time to get back to the grind and look at how you can move forward and take your online store to even greater heights. There are a few fallouts of the holiday season that you will need to manage, and then there are some initiatives that you should plan.

Tynt Deal Could Make 33Across Irresistible to Microsoft January 25, 2012 Brand graph company 33Across has acquired Tynt, a company that tracks user behavior for publishers. Both companies were mum about the amount of the all-stock deal. Tynt will take 33Across into a new market; the combined companies will reach 1.25 billion users globally, according to 33Across.

IBM Hones Social Enterprise Tools January 17, 2012 IBM continues to carve out its own stake in the social enterprise app space -- a market forecast by Forrester Research to grow 61 percent each year to reach $6.4 billion by 2016 -- with the beta rollout of the next release of its enterprise social networking platform, IBM Connections.

The Data-Driven Digital Revolution December 28, 2011 Traditionally, online advertising was viewed primarily as a direct-response vehicle. However, the growing use of data to define and deliver audience targeting means it now can have an impact on all levels of the purchasing funnel -- from fostering awareness to reaching consumers at the ideal intersection between desire, intent and action.

New MINE Tools Can Refine Mountains of Data December 21, 2011 Massive data sets -- a season's worth of baseball statistics, for example, or health data from around the world -- can contain some very revealing knowledge. The problem confronting researchers, though, is finding it. That may be a little easier with some tools developed by scientists at Harvard University and the Broad Institute.

Big Money for Big Data November 09, 2011 Accel Partners is launching a $100 million fund to identify -- and fund -- entrepreneurs at every layer of the big data stack, in particular, those developing projects for the Apache Hadoop platform. The Accel Big Data Fund is aligned with Cloudera, which is pushing development in Hadoop.

IBM Aims to Whittle Big Data Down to Size October 27, 2011 IBM debuted industry-specific data analytics tools for the healthcare and communication sectors at its Information on Demand conference. These packages are part of IBM's drive to help companies manage their information processes and data storage needs as efficiently as possible. For the communications analytics appliance, IBM is leveraging the technology it acquired through Netezza.

Predictive Analytics Digs Deeper Into CRM October 24, 2011 Predixion Software has introduced Predixion Insight 2.0, the latest version of its collaborative predictive analytics solution. The new release includes enterprise collaboration features, interactive visualizations and automated workflow capabilities, as well as an on-premises version of its predictive analytics solution.

CRM's Place in IT Spending Plans October 10, 2011 Half of U.S. companies plan to invest more on IT resources in 2012 than in 2011. In fact, 10 percent of the companies recently surveyed were planning an increase of 10 percent or greater; only one out of 10 planned to decrease spending next year. "Our survey shows that companies view technology investments as a means to drive efficiencies and make existing employees more productive," said Nucleus Research VP Rebecca Wettemann.

Workforce Management Gets Intelligence Boost September 26, 2011 Customer interaction analytics specialist Nexidia has announced a new integration partnership with Teleopti, a provider of strategic workforce management solutions. The aim of the partnership is to enhance agent performance management by linking Nexidia's performance measuring applications with Teleopti's skills-based contact center agent forecasting and scheduling.

Seed the Cloud September 21, 2011 Turn on an episode of Seinfeld and return with me to the 1990s! This summer the National Venture Capital Association released results for the second quarter of this year, showing that $7.5 billion was invested in 966 deals. This represented an increase of 19 percent in dollars and deals over the first quarter and continues a trend of larger deal sizes relative to 2010. Who's getting the money?

SAS Social Media Analytics Keeps an Album of Performance Snapshots August 26, 2011 SAS is beefing up its SAS Social Media Analytics application with new features that give users a better handle on their social media effectiveness: improved tracking of past versus present performance, and benchmarks to assess competitors' performance. For example, the company's new social scorecard module lets managers view channel activity over a period time on such sites as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

New CRM Chat Tools Give Instant Gratification August 15, 2011 Recent announcements in the CRM space have been all about crossing bridges to streamline customer contact functions and making customer service representatives' lives easier and more productive. And all it's taking is a click of the mouse. LiveChat, a developer of real-time software and Web analytics tools for e-commerce sales and support teams, has given word that it is rolling out a new Facebook Connect integration capability.

The Social Game Changers August 10, 2011 Once considered the red-headed stepchild of the gaming industry, social gaming is finally taking its rightful place at the table. The free-to-play model has surged to the forefront of next-generation gaming, while console game companies and traditional game developers have faltered by the wayside.

The Data-Fueled Display Ad Revival August 08, 2011 For more than 15 years -- since the dawn of the Internet, really -- display advertising has held promise, but it has often underperformed with boring, static banner ads whose value diminished greatly as consumers became trained to ignore them. Today, innovative technologies are pumping new life into display advertising and helping e-commerce brands profit by turning this medium into a finely tuned, money-making channel.

CMOs, Analytics and the Great Revenue Chase August 01, 2011 As companies head out into the brave new post-recession world, the top two goals for marketers are organic revenue growth and margin growth. To help achieve these objectives, marketing budgets grew by an average of 4 percent for 2011. The crucial question, then, is this: How do CMOs invest that marketing budget wisely to maximize gains?

Dealing With Emotional Data July 27, 2011 Someone recently commented on my post about curation. In part, the comment read, "Do you mean that it is the end result of the analytics phase, where relevant information on a specific topic is collected and acted upon?" The answer is yes and no, and I thought it would make a worthy topic to occupy the next couple of minutes.

The Coming Age of Curation July 20, 2011 We tend to think of social media as a property of CRM, and it is, but the story hardly stops there. Social media is changing the world beyond CRM too, and that's what makes it valuable. If being social were strictly about commerce, it might not be worth writing about. This week's Economist has a cover story and special section on social media and its impact on the news business.

Search History: Google and Germany, Part 3 July 14, 2011 Google's privacy-conscious initiatives are often born in Germany. Heeding the objections to Street View, which rained down from national authorities and wary Germans, Google introduced an opt-out feature that allowed people to officially request that their homes be blurred out -- nearly 250,000 applications were submitted. Google also hatched an engineering team devoted to privacy protection in Munich.

Search History: Google and Germany, Part 2 July 13, 2011 Following Germany's reunification, victims and villains alike wanted to forget the country's past. And this, for everyone, required privacy. "I've jokingly talked about the privacy tree: It's brown and it has green leaves," said historian Konrad H. Jarausch, referring to Nazis (brown) and Leftists (green).